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“Now! Hard aport!”
“But it’s just land!”
“Now, nuke it, do it now!”
Ryan let go of Krysty’s arm. He started to grab for the wheel.
But Nataly, her normally narrow eyes now saucer-wide, began to crank the big spoked wheel counterclockwise for all she was worth. The Mississippi Queen began to heel to the right as her bow swung left.
They were curving toward what indeed looked to Krysty like solid land at a good rate of speed. She gripped the sill in front of her with her right hand and Ryan’s arm with her left. Bracing was the only thing she could think of to do.
The vessel shuddered to another hit.
The land rushed toward them. Krysty held her breath.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc crowed from behind them. “I see it!”
Then Krysty did, too. The weeds were thinner directly in front of them, stretching twenty or twenty-five yards to either side. The Queen’s bow slid smoothly among them, right into a channel Krysty would have bet her life a few seconds ago was not there.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” Trace said, “welcome to Wolf Creek.”
An explosion came from behind. It was as loud as rolling thunder, and made the stout little vessel rock violently back and forth. Instantly Krysty’s keen nostrils smelled fresh smoke, and not just of burned black powder.
“There’s another fire in the cabin,” Avery yelled from the hatch in the aft bulkhead.
“Get anybody who’s not pumping out the hull to fight the fire, Avery,” Trace ordered. Her voice was getting as thin as hope.
“That’s us,” Ryan said, straightening. Krysty went with him.
“Ryan,” Trace called. Krysty saw her sway despite Mildred’s strong hand supporting her. “Have that albino scout of yours keep his eyes skinned. Stand ready to repel boarders.”
“Right,” Ryan said.
“Nataly, take us up-channel at least a mile. Then look for the best place to ground her.”
The first mate had the steel back in her spine. “Aye-aye!”
“Mildred, help me…lie down. Then you’re relieved from tending me to join your friends. I need to pass out now.”
“Then let us help you out on deck to get you laid down,” Mildred said, working her hands professionally up the captain’s solid body as she stood up. “I’m not laying you down in this slop, no way.”
Trace’s short-haired head lolled on her neck. “What…ever.”
Her eyes rolled up in her head. Mildred was ready, but still had to bend her knees to hang on to the woman when her knees sagged.
“I’ll help you, Mildred,” Krysty said. She went to support the now-unconscious—or perhaps semiconscious—captain from the left.
It feels good to be able to do something, she thought. Even if we’re nowhere near safe yet.
* * *
“FIREBLAST!” RYAN EXCLAIMED as the sound of cannon fire echoed between the banks of Wolf Creek.
But when he paused in chopping away burning planks from the starboard side of the Mississippi Queen’s cabin to look astern to where the dull booms came from, he saw nothing but clear green water on Wolf Creek. They had rounded enough of a bend in the stream that the original screen of weeds that had shielded the creek’s mouth had passed out of sight. But he could clearly see two big banks of smoke like river-hugging fog, off above the flat land with its tall grass. The tops of the smoke clouds were already tinted gold by the rays of the sun sinking into the horizon.
“Poteetville and New Vick,” Arliss said grimly. The ship rigger was perched perilously atop the weakening roof of the Queen’s cabin forward of the fire, directing water from a canvas hose into its hungry red heart. “They found better things to play with than us. Meaning each other.”
“Think they’ll follow us this way?” Ricky asked. He was taking a break from manning the deck pumps, which worked on a teeter-totter sort of principle, like a railway flatcar. Although now that they were in a side channel, and out of the line of fire, Myron had throttled back the Diesels and diverted some power to pumping out the water gushing in through the breach. Instead Ricky and Jak were kicking the burning planks chopped free overboard.
There wasn’t enough power to spare for the above decks pumps too. Myron clearly reckoned that if the boat sank, it would take care of the fire, anyway. So his priority was keeping her afloat. His prime enemy as he saw it was water, and Ryan couldn’t disagree.
Avery laughed. He was pointing out to Ryan where to cut with the ax, plus helping out with one of his own.
“Not triple likely, kid. They probably forgot all about us. The only stuff we had worth stealing’s burned to the waterline. Least as far as they know.”
“The only reason either bunch really had for shooting at us,” Arliss pointed out, “was that they’re both plain mean. They’ve been rival king-ass fucks lording over this stretch of river for generations, each with only the other to give them any kind of check. And it went to their heads.”
“So are they meaner than the countryside hereabouts?” Ricky asked.
“Unless the stickies or the swampers got themselves some cannon,” J.B. replied, “I’d reckon yeah.”
“Too slagging right,” Jake said. He was handling the portside hose, where Krysty and Mildred worked the pump, while J.B. and Doc operated the starboard one that fed Arliss’s.
Ryan wasn’t pleased about Krysty working as hard as she was so soon after her concussion. But since the concussion wasn’t literally life-or-death, but putting out the fire might be, he knew better than to try to order her to sit this one out.
“But we gotta beach her soon,” Lewis said. “Then everything changes.”
It was the longest speech Ryan had heard the lanky man make. His tone carried a sense of doom. And if Ryan had any doubt the Queen was doomed—at least so long as she stayed in open water—Arliss chilled it at once.
“She’s riding lower in the water as every minute passes.”
“At least we mostly got the fire beat down,” Avery stated.
“What happens if we go down?” Ricky asked.
“Nile crocodiles,” Jake said with doleful satisfaction.
Ricky emitted a yelp of terror. Everybody laughed. He blushed.
Suzan came back aft. “Captain’s compliments, Ryan, and she asks that you present yourself on the bridge at your earliest convenience.”
Obviously under the inspiration of their captain, Ryan had noticed the crew was partial to the use of old-timey-sounding nautical talk on formal occasions. “She requests your advice picking a spot to ground the vessel.”
“Right,” he said. Just because he knew the game didn’t mean he had to play. Their employers didn’t seem to expect it of him or his people, anyway.
“We got the fire controlled,” Arliss said. “Jake, Avery and I can take it from here. You all can go.”
“You heard the lady,” he said, passing the hose down to Krysty and clambering from the roof of the mostly gutted cabin. “Let’s shift on out of here.”
Jak looked at him with eagerness written on his face. “Go up top, watch?”
He nodded. Jak scrambled up to the roof.
“Man doesn’t talk much,” he told the Queen crew members.
“Noticed,” Jake said.
* * *
“WAIT,” MILDRED MUTTERED. “How did I wind up carrying the lower end of this freaking coffin when the dude on the other end is like eight feet tall?”
Santee was not, in fact, eight feet tall, although he was six-six, minimum, or she was the Pope, Mildred thought, and he was indisputably on the end higher up the staircase. Or “ladder,” as the boat people insisted on calling it. That struck the much shorter Mildred as markedly unfair.
Of course what they were carrying could only serve as a coffin for a child or a very short adult. It was no more than five feet long and felt as if it were packed with lead ingots. Or maybe she felt burdened because it was sweltering hot there in the cargo hold, and she had to breathe through a wet handkerchief tied around her face to filter out the smoke. And then there was the stench of rotting blood from poor Edna and Maggie, although their bodies had been taken ashore.
“What’s in it, anyway?” she demanded as she struggled up the stairs with her unbalanced burden. “Shouldn’t we only be carrying, like, food and other vital supplies off the boat?”
The big man smiled down at her. “Treasure,” he said cheerfully. Nothing seemed to get to Santee.
She managed to make it up the rest of the way and onto the deck, where the two of them handed the long wooden box over the rail to a quartet of workers standing in shin-deep shallows. Then she propped her butt on the rail to catch her breath. Santee said nothing, only drank deeply from a canteen and handed it to her.
He didn’t seem offended when she wiped the mouth with her hands. Even on short acquaintance, the Mississippi Queen’s crew had learned that she had her eccentricities. Fortunately, they were inclined to take folk at their own value, and not sweat that kind of thing unless it slopped over into their own personal lives. They weren’t outlaws, these people who made their livings on the river—certainly not by the standards of the day—but they were pretty clearly outcasts, who had trouble fitting into the more settled societies ashore.
Which is probably why we and they get along like bosom buddies, she thought.
Her companions and the crew worked without particular urgency to unload the boat of whatever was deemed necessary, and prepare a camp on the riverbank, which was as flat as a board and barely higher than the water. The sun wasn’t going to set for some time yet, and it wasn’t as if they could hide their presence.
Ryan and the captain had chosen a decent spot to ground the boat. It was a mostly clear area of dry, firm soil. The radiation in the immediate vicinity wouldn’t chill them too quickly, according to Ryan’s coat-lapel rad counter. As for the amount of heavy metals—brutally toxic—they might be taking in, there was no way to tell, which didn’t make Mildred any too happy. But what mattered was immediate survival. In the absence of that none of the other stuff would matter anyway.
The one slightly alarming aspect was the presence of a dilapidated railroad bridge barely a quarter mile upstream. The rusty steel structure had fallen into the creek from roughly one-third of the way out from this bank almost to the far side. Likely there was still a rail line, long overgrown by weeds, leading to and from it. The problematic part was, this region was alleged to be crawling with stickies, and that derelict bridge would provide an ace nest for a major stickie colony.
Still, she thought, we take what we can get. As usual.
Ryan was hacking back the long grass and scrub surrounding their landing point with his panga. Jake was helping out with a scythe that they seemed to be carrying to trade at some point. He mowed the stuff down far faster than Ryan, and likely could have done as well by himself. But Ryan clearly felt the need to do something, especially after the enforced helplessness when they were trying to run from a bunch of boats shooting cannon at them.
At least Ryan and Mildred had prevailed on Krysty to take it easy, once they got ashore. She had insisted on carrying her own backpack off the vessel—fortunately all their gear had survived the fires and general smashing. Then she went off to the side and sat down on her jacket, spread out on the dirt. She was acting normally, aside from her not being in the thick of all this activity.
Mildred smirked. Sometimes she got her companions to stop acting as if they were superhuman, and to take some regard for their health. If you didn’t take care of yourself some, your performance degraded. There was no way around that. And especially given the way they all lived, that was a fast ride to a hole in the ground, with dirt hitting you in the eyes. Such was life in the Deathlands.
Sadly, the captain would not listen to Mildred’s urging that she rest after her terrible injury and blood loss, though in fairness she wasn’t listening to her own people, either. She was wading around in the water with Avery and Nataly, inspecting the pierced hull to see if it could be repaired. Or if it even had the structural integrity left to be worth repairing. After sharing a brief, impassioned hug with her, her husband had retreated below to the engine compartment with J.B. and Ricky, doing something to take care of the engines, which Mildred understood not at all and cared about less.
She decided to watch Trace closely. Strangely, aside from her losing her lower arm, and Edna and Maggie losing their lives, no one was seriously hurt. Pretty much everybody had gotten cut, scraped, bruised and burned. Even Nataly looked as if she’d just gotten a bad sunburn on the left side of her face, once the grime and gore got washed off. Mildred guessed it hurt like bloody hell, but the first mate was stoic about it.
Well, great.
She heaved herself to her feet. Suzan and Abner MacReedy were carrying a crate of scavvied canned goods out of the hull. They were prime trade goods, too, as whatever the few-spoken Santee termed “treasure” presumably was. But if their day-to-day survival depended on consuming them—well, they were cheap at the price, as long as they weren’t spoiled. She reckoned she needed to get back and pitch in.
We’re all exhausted, she thought. Surely I can take my eyes off Trace and Krysty for a few minutes…
From his perch atop the cabin, which was the most intact roof section of the largely burned-out cabin, Jak yelled out, “Crocs! Lots!”
Chapter Six (#ulink_572b7fa8-4e49-5d70-a436-668d31ebd712)
Ryan knew their scout Jak didn’t cry wolf. But what really ripped his attention away from hacking at the weeds surrounding the camp—and keeping his eye scanning in all directions inland, mindful of all the reasons he was trying to clear the tall grass and brush away—was that Jak’s falcon-scream warning was followed promptly by the cracking, booming blast of his .357 Magnum Colt Python handblaster.
Unlike the rest of them, who were extremely handy with a blaster—even Mildred had been an Olympic-level pistol shot in her day, and carried a competition-quality Czech-made ZKR 551 revolver to prove it—Jak was all about blades. At any given time he had a dozen or so knives hidden on his body, both for close-quarters fighting and throwing. He was ace with them all, and he loved getting the chance to use his skill.
Ryan’s head snapped around in time to see the grounded Mississippi Queen’s first mate and chief shipwright pick up their captain by the elbows and carry her onto the bank, sending big splashes of water into the twilit air. There were four or five others in the shallow water that he could see, including Doc and Ricky, helping unload the boat of whatever Arliss deemed necessary.
Another thunder crack ripped from Jak’s Python. Ryan saw a plume of water spurt up about ten yards downstream of the boat. The craft was beached at an angle of about forty-five degrees, with the keep of its prow driven into the soft soil of the beach, and its stern pointing west. Trace had ordered Nataly to bring her in that way to facilitate loading and unloading. The actual channel of Wolf Creek got steep fast, they told Ryan, who had no reason to doubt them.
They know their trade, and we know ours. There wasn’t a nuking thing any of us could have done to stop us from winding up here, stranded on some forsaken shore in the middle of a nuking strontium swamp, he knew.
The one-eyed man hated the feeling of helplessness their bombardment had pounded into him. Into all of them, he knew, crew and companion alike.
He was already running toward the shore, transferring his panga to his left hand and drawing his SIG Sauer P226 handblaster with his right. His boots wanted to sink into the firm but moist soil. It was just this side of being straight-up mud. Out in the stream, Ryan could see what looked like random snags disturbing the water’s oleaginous flow, except that they hadn’t been there before. They were strangely bumpy. Some of those bumps showed glabrous gleams. And they were moving.
“Fireblast!” he burst out. There had to be a dozen of the bastards. More. How did so many get so close without Jak noticing them? he wondered.
Then he saw what seemed like a mostly submerged log, but with eye-bumps on the near end, slide out of the lower weeds in the water by the far bank, sculling with faint side-to-side strokes of its tail.
The bastards were cunning, he thought. They snuck up on them.
“Mildred!” Ryan yelled. “Stay in the nuking boat!”
The physician froze with one leg over the rail. The last of the stragglers in the water had made the sanctuary of the bank. Clearly, Mildred didn’t realize the big Nile crocodiles could swim quite easily in water as shallow as that surrounding the hull.
Jak fired again. Ryan could see thrashing in the water this time, and he spotted a pink tinge in some of the splashes. A couple of the “snags” diverted toward it. Apparently these bastards weren’t above making a meal out of one of their buddies.
But the others headed for the bank like starved ville rats offered a feast by their tyrant baron. Blasters were coming out among the people onshore, although they hesitated to waste ammo on such dubious targets.
When she was about four feet from the water, Trace shook off her helpers. Then she turned back to the creek.
“We should be clear as long as we keep away from the water,” she said. “We just need to figure out how to drive these bastards off so we can work on getting the Queen under way again.”
“At least we’ve got plenty of ammo,” Arliss said. Though the Queen’s crew preferred black powder blasters—indeed, preferred fleeing to shooting, whenever the option offered—they kept a hefty store of all kinds and calibers of ammunition in the hold. It was something they could always trade, and be pretty sure of catching a profit, too, almost regardless what they traded for it.
“Right,” the captain said. Despite her horrible wound, she seemed strong and in command of herself. Ryan knew what it felt like to step up in emergencies, disregarding your own wounds. If he hadn’t shown that knack early on, he’d never have made it out of Front Royal alive, after his brother Harvey’s treachery cost him his eye and left him with a scar down his face.
“I saw,” Doc said, stepping toward her tentatively with his outsize LeMat wheel gun in his knobbly-knuckled hand. “I am not sure it is safe to stand so close to the water, Captain. These Nile crocodiles have a reputation as being quite aggressive.”
She waved him off with her stump. “Light some torches,” she commanded. “I bet they don’t like fi—”
In the midst of a big wave of water a huge, pebble-scaled form erupted from the creek. Tooth-daggered jaws opened what seemed a whole yard wide. Before anyone could react, they snapped shut on the captain around her waist.
“Hold fire!” Ryan shouted. He tucked the SIG back in its holster and charged.
The croc was a monster, at least twenty feet long. It was shaking Trace in its jaw like a dog with a rat as it backed toward the water.
